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Tópico: Neurociência – Notícias Aleatórias (Lida 2778 vezes)

Your Brain on FictionAMID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience.

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.

In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.

Math Formula May Explain Why Serial Killers KillResearchers have discovered that the seemingly erratic behavior of the "Rostov Ripper," a prolific serial killer active in the 1980s, conformed to the same mathematical pattern obeyed by earthquakes, avalanches, stock market crashes and many other sporadic events. The finding suggests an explanation for why serial killers kill.

Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury, electrical engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles, modeled the behavior of Andrei Chikatilo, a gruesome murderer who took the lives of 53 people in Rostov, Russia between 1978 and 1990. Though Chikatilo sometimes went nearly three years without committing murder, on other occasions, he went just three days. The researchers found that the seemingly random spacing of his murders followed a mathematical distribution known as a power law.

When the number of days between Chikatilo's murders is plotted against the number of times he waited that number of days, the relationship forms a near-straight line on a type of graph called a log-log plot. It's the same result scientists get when they plot the magnitude of earthquakes against the number of times each magnitude has occurred — and the same goes for a variety of natural phenomena. The power law outcome suggests that there was an underlying natural process driving the serial killer's behavior.

Simkin and Roychowdhury hypothesize that it's the same type of effect that has also been found to cause epileptics to have seizures. The psychotic effects that lead a serial killer to commit murder "arise from simultaneous firing of large number of neurons in the brain," they wrote. The paper, a preprint of which is available on the arXiv, has been submitted to Biology Letters.(continua...)

Older Brain Is Willing, but Too FullLearning becomes more difficult as we age not because we have trouble absorbing new information, but because we fail to forget the old stuff, researchers say.Continua

Want to change someone's mind while pretending to encourage them? All you need to do is set a high standard for something and give them a little time. Even if they reach your standards, they've already self-sabotaged.

Welcome to another little guide to practical evil. Today, we'll show you how the "availability heuristic" can be used to destroy someone's life. A heuristic is a sort of mental rule of thumb that people use when they don't have time or desire to do exhaustive research. The availability heuristic shows that, lacking complete information, people will form an opinion based on information that comes easily to mind. For example, if there are a lot of financial scandals making headlines, people will say that there's an uptick of white-collar crime, even if the overall rate is the same. Ask if there are more words that have "w" as the first letter or "h" as the second letter, they'll say there are more words with w as the first letter because we're better at retrieving words based on their first letter than their second letter. It's the mental difficulty, or ease, that determines their opinion.

Naturally, psychologists figured out a way to turn this heuristic to evil. A team led by psychologist Norbert Schwarz decided to crush people's self-confidence by asking them to list a few example of themselves being assertive, and then asking them to rate whether or not they were an assertive person. It turned out the difference in whether a person thought they were assertive or passive lay in the amount of examples requested of them. Those who were asked to list six examples did so easily and generally thought they were assertive. Those who were asked to list twelve examples had to struggle, but eventually came up with twelve examples. They had twice the number of reasons to think of themselves as assertive, and but they considered themselves relatively meek. It wasn't the number of examples that they based their self-estimate on, it was the struggle to think of examples.

It turns out that this mind trickery works when people are evaluating anything. Ask a person to think of a lot of reasons to change jobs, propose to their significant other, or buy a house. Although they'll complete the list, they'll be less likely to think it's a good idea than someone who came up with only a few reasons but came up with them easily. People will think that if they have that much trouble thinking up reasons, it can't be a good idea. And bingo - instant villainous mind control.

Critical incident stress management (CISM) is an adaptive, short-term psychological helping-process that focuses solely on an immediate and identifiable problem. It can include pre-incident preparedness to acute crisis management to post-crisis follow-up. Its purpose is to enable people to return to their daily routine more quickly and with less likelihood of experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder.[1] More recent studies, however, call the efficacy of CISM into question, and suggest that it may in fact be harmful.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

[...]Criticism

A number of studies have shown that CISM has little effect, or that it actually worsens the trauma symptoms.[14] Several meta-analyses in the medical literature either find no preventative benefit of CISM,[2][3][4] or negative impact for those debriefed.[5][6][7][8] On the other hand, Jacobs, Horne-Moyer and Jones [15] argue that CISM has beneficial effects when conducted with emergency services personnel, but does not work or does more harm than good with accident victims.

More and more hospitals and clinics now offer music therapy as a supplementary treatment for everything from anxiety to Alzheimer’s, but its efficacy varies for different conditions. Neurologist Oliver Sacks and several music therapists discuss the science and practice of music therapy.Produced by SciFri Staff

GUESTS

Oliver Sacks Professor, Neurology and Psychiatry

Columbia University Medical Center

New York, New YorkConcetta “Connie” Tomaino Executive Director and Co-Founder, Institute for Music and Neurologic Function

Warning fatigue - This is when people become desensitised to health messages and pay no attention whatsoever

Risk factor phobia - Some people become increasingly fearful about the hazards posed by their lifestyle and diet, often over-reacting

Forbidden fruit effect - A deliberate defiance of authoritarian health warnings. For instance, warnings about the dangers of eating beef on the bone resulted in a rush for just such products before they were banned by the government

We found a positive, linear effect of fear on overall intentions/behavior and a positive effect of including an efficacy message. Fear appeals are also more effective for one-time-only behaviors (e.g., screenings) vs. repeated behaviors (e.g., dieting), and for detection behaviors (e.g., screenings) vs. prevention/promotion behaviors (e.g., vaccines), as predicted by Rothman and Salovey’s theory of gain- and loss-framed messages. Finally, as predicted based on Regulatory Focus Theory, fear was more effective in prevention-focused populations. Fear was significantly more effective in East Asian (vs. Western) countries, in all-female (vs. all-male) samples, and in samples with higher proportions of Asian or female participants.

[...] But Deutschman quotes Dr. Edward Miller, CEO of the hospital at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School.: “If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, ninety percent of them have not changed their lifestyle,” Miller said. “And that’s been studied over and over again... Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can’t.”

Why can’t they? Well, “healthy eating” is a complex habit change, involving many moving parts. People need specific information, not just about mealtime planning, portion control, and healthy foods, but also about handling cravings and bouncing back from lapses, among other things. “Fear of death,” while seemingly a powerful motivator, might be so scary that some patients, ironically, might turn to their favorite comfort foods to cope. Finally, once patients leave the hospital, they find themselves back in the environments that caused the over-eating in the first place.

By contrast, Deutschman takes a look at people with heart disease who entered a program to help them. They added outside support—what I call changepower—to their willpower. (In this case, they used Dean Ornish’s program.) After 3 years, 77% of these patients had maintained healthy lifestyle changes. [...]

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) x 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two nonexpert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts' judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.